And in fact when you look at what's on the pile, it's certainly not all rubbish. There's a couple of Viragos on there -- and in fact I found another, May Sinclair's The Three Sisters -- after I'd taken the photo. The biggest disappointment there was The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West, who is one of my best-loved novelists. This is an early novel, and all I can say is that she doesn't seem to have found her voice yet. I lasted about half a chapter of this one, and the same with the Holtby and the Sinclair.
And what about Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety? It's an extraordinary tour-de-force, set at the beginning of the French Revolution, and I read about half of its enormous length with great pleasure and then ground to a halt. Perhaps I'll get back to it. As for Parade's End, I loved this on the TV recently, and as a fully paid up adorer of Ford Madox Ford's somewhat contentious The Good Soldier I couldn't wait to get my hands on the novel. But no, it just confused me and I gave up really quickly. Another one for later, perhaps.
I won't be coming back to the AS Byatt or the Deborah Moggach. Though I've liked some of their other books quite a lot, these ones ended up by boring me. Kathy Reichs was a disappointment as I didn't realize that this was not a Tempe Brennan novel, which series I have gobbled up in the past and hoped to go on with the gobbling. An Equal Stillness was a Christmas present -- I read about a third of it, put it down, and never picked it up again. The Weight of Silence I found in a charity shop and didn't warm to at all though it had sounded intriguing. And the Attica Locke was kindly left for me by a visitor who knows how much I love crime novels, but somehow I just couldn't get into it.
All this is really rather disappointing and worrying. I know sometimes it's possible to change your mind and start to love things you thought you never would like at all -- notably this happened to me with Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which was given to me for my birthday many years ago. I twice picked it up, read the first page, and thought, no, not for me -- and it ended up, when I finally did read it, being one of my absolute favorite novels. And of course there are still things I do enjoy -- I'm just finishing my second William Boyd this month, Ordinary Thunderstorms, and loving every minute, and I'm amazed to find myself enjoying Ivy Compton-Burnett -- I'm about halfway through A Family and a Fortune and I think I've finally got ICB. More on these soon.
How about you? Any notable rejects?